[ applause ] day two of the Republican Convention begins this afternoon. House speaker paul ryan, majority leader much mcconnell, House Majority leader kevin mccarthy, two of Donald Trumps children and former republican president ial candidate ben carson are all scheduled to speak. Tonights theme is make america work again. Live Convention Coverage starts today on cspan at 5 30 p. M. Youll have a front row seat to every minute of the republican and Democratic National conventions on cspan. Org. Watch live streams of the Convention Proceedings without commentary or commercials. Use our video clipping tool to create your own clips of your favorite convention moments and share them on social media. Also, read twitter feeds from delegates and reporters in cleveland and philadelphia. Our special Convention Pages have everything you need to get the most of cspans gaveltogavel coverage. Go to cspan. Org Republicannational Convention and cspan. Org Democraticnational Convention for updated Schedule Information to see whats happening during each convention session, and every speech will be available on demand for viewing when you want on your desktop, laptop, tablet and esphone. Our special Convention Pages and all of cspan. Org are a publicer isives have your cable or satellite provider. So if youre a cspan watcher check it out on the web at cspan. Org. Next on American History tv, we hear from historians and activists who reflect on the historical arc of the civil rights moment this. Discussion, part of a threeday conference called the future of the africanamerican past. It was cohosted by the American Historical Association and the Smithsonian National museum of africanAmerican History and culture which opens this september on the national mall. This is an hour and 40 minutes. This moirng got a call from a reporter who wanted to know why would the museum at a time when it was focused on opening the building, why would the museum even help to organize such a conference . Well, the simple answer is that were crazy, but the real answer is at the smithsonian, at this museum, scholarship is the engine, and research is the lifeblood of the institution. Without the decades of research and academic scholarship as a foundation, there would be no National Museum of africanAmerican History and culture, so we know that we are tied so much to the work that so many of you do. So much of the intellectual and interpretive agenda of the museum has been shaped by the work of many who are participating in this conference. Thanks to this amazing array of scholarship, the museum is able to position itself as an institution that will help all who visit find a rich, complex and nuanced history of the africanamerican community, but even more importantly thanks to your work this museum will recenter the africanamerican experience and use africanAmerican History and culture as a lens to understand what it means to be an american so that the audiences who visit will realize how much americas identity and aspirations have been profoundly shaped by this history, by this culture and this because of you. Since the purdue conference, the field of africanAmerican History and culture has expanded and morphed so many times. As such, there are so many issues, so many topics, so many themes that it was impossible to do everything in this conference, and there are so many gifted scholars whose voices should be heard but who cant for this particular conference. It says, i think, so much about the vibrancy, the importance, the expansive nature of the field of africanAmerican History that no single conference can hold it all, but we are so excited about this conference because were excited about the array of scholars who are gathered here, and in some ways, as i see deidre of my staff say, okay, lone, stop talking, let me begin the conference by introducing the moderator of tonights roundtable, the long struggle for civil rights and black freedom, barbara ramsby. Barbara is a dear friend who is a professor of history and africanamerican studies as well as gender and womens studies at the university of illinois. A student of the black Freedom Movement and a longtime activist, she has been a close observer and participant in the black lives Matter Movement of which shes currently writing a book on the movement eats origins. Her work is well known. Weve all revelled in the biographies that she has written, and i want to tell you how honored and pleased we are, so please join me in welcoming a great friend and colleague, barbara ramsby. [ applause ] weve invited the whole panel to join us here for the roundtable. What a lovely audience. Thank you all for coming out this evening. I want to start off this evening, this roundtable, by thanking lonnie bunch. He thanked a lot of people, and i echo those thanks. It takes a lot to put on a conference like this and get a lot of very busy people in one place at one time, but i also want to thank and acknowledge lonnie for what has been a decade long labor of lot. You know, he was in chicago before, so we loaned him to this project. But it has been a decade of hard work and struggle and maybe some surprises along the way, and im sure, as we stand on the threshold of the opening of this historic new institution, this powerful institution, that none of us will be disappointed. And so, thank you, lonnie, to you and your staff and to all the hard work that is making what were anticipating possible. [ applause ] i also want to invite all of you here tonight to come to the next two days, because as i look out at the audience, i cant see all the faces but i know they are there, some of the most prominent and distinguished historians are in this audience, people who have made time to be here for this conference, who have present who will present papers in the next two days and so tonight is really the warmup act for the next two days, so, please, come back and participate in the discussion and the debate and you will not be disappointed. What i want to say tonight is by way of introduction is that while we want to give the past its due, we also want to give appropriate attention what dr. King called a fierce urgency of now. We have an extraordinary roundtable of panelists. Their bios are in your program, and maybe youve seen them on your website so im not going to give extensive introductions, but suffice to say there is a vast wealth of wisdom on this panel, both scholarly and experiencial from Terrence Roberts who was one of the little rock nine who marched into Little Rock Central High School in 1957 and made history, to the youngest member of our panel, jessica pierce, who is a fierce and formidable organizer with the black Youth Project 100 and has organized direct actions all over this country, and we expect her to be a part of that cohort to change the world, and in between we have three extraordinarily prominent historians, clay carson from stanford university, sarah evans, professor amarita university of minnesota, and roslyn turborg penn, also professor emarita from Morgan State University so join me in welcoming the roundtable participants. I did not select this panel, but i could not have selected a better group of people to start this conversation about the long Civil Rights Movement, and as jim grossman told me this election process, this represents a group of people who not only have thought and written and reflected about the civil rights and black freedom struggle but who in very concrete ways have been a part of and whose work has been influenced in very intimate ways by the movements of the 50s, 60s and 70s so im going to start with a question, and were going to have a back and forth, and they know this question so im not surprising them with it so dont, you know, think they are coming up with their great succinct answers on their feet. But the question is simply this. What was your entry into the movement . Tell us what was the most powerful set of events . What were the circumstances under which you entered into the work related to the black Freedom Movement, either as a scholar or as an activist. Some of you have written about this. Clay has written about this and some of the work that hes done so maybe well start with you, clay. Well, for me it started right here. I mean, literally right here on this street because when i was 19 years old, i came to the march on washington, and that was my first demonstration, and i thought that they were all going to be like that and so the movement was a very good thing to be in, and one of the things though that i think puts that in context is that a few days before coming here, i had met Stokley Carmichael at a student conference and then he was a senior at howard, and he introduced me to something that i really didnt know too much about, and i would like to make a distinction between what we might call the Civil Rights Movement which kind of culminated with the march on washington, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights act of 65 with what i might call the freedom struggle, and and what he i remember i told him i was going to try to get to the march, and he kind of derided that. Why would you want to go to that washington picnic when you can really join the movement . And he started talking about what they were doing in the deep south and the Delta Mississippi and all of that, and i didnt have enough nerve to tell him that just going to the march was the most courageous political thing i had done in my life and going to these places would have been beyond that. And a few months later i met well, i didnt meet, i heard bob moses giving a talk about plans for the mississippi i think it was a meeting in new orleans, plans for the mississippi summer, and, again, i kind of had this sense that beyond the movement that, you know, like i grew up reading in the newspaper about you, and it was it was the little rock nine were my heros, you know. That was the movement that i saw out there, but i think when i met stokley and bob moses, i realized that there was something deeper and that there were people in the movement who were not seeking civil rights legislation and would not be satisfied with civil rights bills, and understood that from their perspective Martin Luther king was not they were not following Martin Luther king. Martin luther king was following them, that they were in the vanguard of the movement, and i think that realization has shaped everything ive done since then because thats thats what i tried to join, the freedom struggle. Thats what my first book was about, was about that freedom struggle, and i think today, just to kind of set up this discussion it seems like the passage of civil rights legislation played shome americans complacent because the people in and at the center of the strug israel understood that their job was the same the day after the Voting Rights act as it was before the Voting Rights act. Thats right. And that they were in a struggle that was going to go on for a long i just recently talked to willy ricks, that some of you might recognize that name, the person who first started using the term black power, and for him this has been a 50year experience in his life, and for so many other people like that, and i think that thats for the generation coming up. I hope that they connect to that. Now, its interesting to hear you remember yourself all those years ago and being impressed with stokley and so forth. I remember once we were in a panel. This was also many years ago and you said as you got older, you know what im going to say, as you got older king got wiser . Yeah, yeah. Any decades after reflections about that moment of sort of seeing the juxtaposition of the rising black Power Movement and kwame torray and those folksed juxtaposed against king and maybe now seeing king in a different right. Well, certainly one of the things i found out is that one of the things that made as many differences as there was between king and snick, they agreed on one thing, that the movement was about much more fundamental things than passage of Civil Rights Acts. I think that king, the way i teach him now, is that rosa parks sent him on a detour, a tenyear detour. That he was a social gospel minister who wanted to i found this one paper that he wrote in 1948 where he talks about his mission as a minister was to deal with unemployment, slums, economic insecurity, and look what he was doing in 1968. So his civil rights part of his life, his career as a civil rights leader was a major part of his adult life, but it wasnt the whole of it, and i think that for young people going back and look at what were the ideas coming out of this freedom struggle and what was kings vision of what he was about, and i think that theres a lot of commonality there. Mmhmm. Sarah evans, what what story do you want to tell us about your entry into the movement. Right. Well, i have to say that my my entry into the movement same primarily when i was an undergraduate at duke university, and i was a bit player on the margins, but i dont downplay the bit players. Yes. As the biographer of ela bake worry have to say. My linkage goes way back because im a white southern, so i grew up in segregation, and my father had preached the year before i was born, had breached a sermon criticizing the biological idea of race, using paul and acts of god, and i was born in the parsonage in a little bitty town in georgia on the south of South Carolina which was kind of siberia. I think ive always known it was about history. My mother told me sometime in early grade school they are going to tell you in school that slavery was not cause of the civil war, but they are wrong, and i wish i could go back and ask her how did she know that. I dont know. And its very deep and its coming back up again now as i think our country is again understanding how deep racism goes, how embedded it is in so many of our ongoing daily relationships and structures and that its never never has been simply about a couple of laws but its about how we live together so and then, of course, i the movement i went to the montgomery march at the culmination of that was my first really big one, and then i got involved in supporting a union at duke because thats where the Civil Rights Movement went. And out of my involvement in the new left and antiwar and civil war i got involved in the movement. I went to my first meeting in chicago in the fall of 67 i hadnt realized how many northern white students went to mississippi in the summer of 64. I didnt even know about mississippi. They didnt recruit down white students in the south. I went to africa that summer and had an extremely interracial experience laying bricks, but it so that was my mississippi experience, but at that point the movement was my identity and i feel like those movements together sent me to graduate school, to study the history women, and one of the things that i am a scholar of is the ways those movements are linked together and the way Civil Rights Movement has been a template for other social movements that are about democracy. Im going skip over jessica. I know she has a lot to say about this and not as far back to dig for her memories of entries into this work, and particularly you two sitting next to each other, because i think one of the things the black lives Matter Movement and black Youth Project 100 have done, despite the way that it gets presented sometimes, is to really foster some Pretty Amazing connections to labor struggles, to immigration struggles, to queer and tran struggles and so forth and i want her to be able to talk about that and i want the other memories from further back. Old lady. Im right there with you, sister. Staying with the historians anyway. Tell us about a little bit about the early 60s, your naacp work and your troublemaking back then. Well, i was a student Queens College city wasnt City University of new york then it was just plain Queens College in the 60s and as soon as we got there as soon as i got there, there was movement and there was a little steal group called the naacp on campus, and and not many black students at queens in those days, but i did know them, who were there, and recruited them and we all so we said, you know, we really need to have a movement go, and i dont know if we used the word movement, but we really need to become activists. We need to do something, so thats what started me going, and then as i went home and, of course, theres no campus there was no residential campus, so we everybody went home at the end of the day. My father had a student at nyu, but he had never talked about his early years there in the 1920s when things were not always too good, but he was there with dorothy hight and she was a troublemaker, oh, yeah, dorothy, oh, yeah, so i knew that what i was doing he understood because he had had some kind of dealing with it before, so thats what got me involved. Then we started wed start being activists so our first forray was to go to woolworths and support by this time it